Saturday, August 23, 2014

Medusa's Pivotal Sequence

By many moviegoers and critics Disney Animation during the 1970s wasn’t hailed as the pioneering medium it once was. But there were still groundbreaking achievements in character animation being made, and this sequence is on one of them.

How on earth would you as an animator even dare to draw scenes in which a villainess takes off her make up during a conversation with a little girl?! This kind if business would seem too subtle for animation, and much more suitable for live action.

But if you are Milt Kahl, you live for challenges like this. He said he got a kick out of working out these scenes, partly because he had never seen anything like this done in animation before.

“I wanted to push the contrast between her eyes with the false eyelashes, and then without them. When she removes an eyelash there is’t any hair left at all. On the cels we had the inkers use a skin-tone outline (instead of black) around the eye, which gave a certain pale, vacant look.”

I consider this sequence as amazing and inventive as anything that was done during Disney’s Golden Age. What a statement in character acting!!

13 comments:

I guess Ollie went for the easy option - the audience would immediately understand the convention of the child cuddling their toy. But Milt's idea would have been a better acting opportunity - to convey that for that moment the doorknob was her only source of comfort: it would have increased the originality of the scene.

Andreas, was the makeup removal scene originally in the storyboards, or did Milt improvise by adding that to the scene? I'm just curious to see if the idea was uniquely Milt's, or if directors Woolie Reitherman and John Lounsbery had some influence.

I still remember this clip I watched on the documentary of Frank and Ollie where Frank was doing the acting for Rufus the cat that Penny talks to at the orphanage. I loved that sequence in the movie. But I forgot how cruel Medusa was to hurt Penny's feelings in this pencil test for that scene. I love how villains have a certain way to hurt the main hero in each Disney movie I have seen. I think one of my favorite villain sequences to hurt a character was when Jafar lies to Princess Jasmine that Aladdin was going to die after she met him. Speaking of did you animate that sequence in Aladdin?

I remember watching this scene as a little girl and I wasn't familiar with false eyelashes so to me it seemed as though Medusa was pulling off her real eyelashes which made her even scarier! The Rescuers has always been one of my favourites on account of how emotive it is. Even the opening credits scene of the bottle travelling is amazing.

This is certainly another peak in the medium. I guess by this point the animators might not have felt as challenged or as inspired by the stories as they had been in the past, so it's clear that Milt jumped at the chance to raise the bar one last time. Amazing that he makes a character that is ugly and evil, appealing!

Love seeing the pencil test for this. For the first time ever I just noticed that Milt animated lettering on the towel around Medusa's head in the close-up line "Do you know what would make Auntie Medusa very happy?" , but the lettering on the towel disappears after that one scene. The lettering says "Hotel ... something" (can't make it out) . They didn't paint the lettering on that scene (even though on the drawings it is solidly shaded in blue , so it seems that it was intended to be painted ) so the lettering doesn't show up very clearly on the cels . I suppose this is one of the many "economy measures" taken at the time.

I remember flipping and rolling that scene when I was a trainee under Eric Larsen. I was in awe of the draftmanship! It was the first time I ever held actual production animation drawings in my hands and it was hard to believe that graphite on paper could evoke such lifelike movement and emotion! That pencil test really doesn't do those individual drawings justice! 36 years later, and the thrill i got then, is still vivid in my mind! He truly was a master! Thanks for posting this Andreas!